Highlights from the Archives

''The Secret Agent,'' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich -- in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash -- has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.

Born in 1857 in the Polish Ukraine, to impoverished landed gentry with a family history of courageous, if reckless, patriotism, Joseph Conrad (ne Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski) became in the course of his difficult lifetime a paragon of the post-Flaubertian literary artist: the writer of idiosyncratic and obsessive genius who is neglected for most of his career by the general reading public, but celebrated by his fellow writers; the virtual martyr to his art who exhausts himself in its service, as in the worship of an inscrutable god.

About 200 of Joseph Conrad's largely unpublished letters to his agent, James Brand Pinker, and to literary friends and notables will appear for the first time early next month in ''The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad.''

Joseph Conrad pursued the business of novel writing as though it required the same spirit of unrelenting struggle against fate and the elements as the business of seamanship. ''He had set himself to be a great writer, an artist in words,'' H. G. Wells recalled. ''He had gone literary with a singleness and intensity of purpose that made the kindred concentration of Henry James seem lax and large and pale.''

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April 20, 2008, Sunday

On the fourth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we feature two essays about terrorist fiction. On Page 14, Benjamin Kunkel, an editor at the literary journal n+1 whose first novel, ''Indecision,'' was recently...

'Tales of Unrest: Joseph Conrad on Stage' Baruch Performing Arts Center It would be a mistake to say that ''Tales of Unrest: Joseph Conrad on Stage'' is Conrad Lite, but its two one-acts from Conrad stories and presented by two companies rest...

A mysterious man with a foreign name meets acolytes at a secret location in the middle of the night. A new recruit is brought before him. Passionate and fearless, the recruit agrees to take a ''vow of blind obedience'': when called upon, he will...